Do not try to seem wise to others. If you want to live a wise life, live it on your own terms and in your own eyes.

The life of wisdom is a life of reason. It is important to learn how to think clearly. Clear thinking is not a haphazard enterprise. It requires proper training.

A person of wisdom should be truthful, without arrogance, without deceit, not slanderous and not hateful.

The wise person should go beyond the evil of greed and miserliness.
To have your mind set on calmness, you must take power over sleepiness, drowsiness and lethargy.
There is no place for laziness and no recourse to pride.

Do not be led into lying, do not be attached to forms.
You must see through all pride and fare along without violence.
Do not get excited by what is old, do not be contented with what is new.
Do not grieve for what is lost or be controlled by desire.

If your best friend were to ask how she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful things to say, and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.

Whenever we look around the world, we see smart leaders – in politics, in business, in media – making terrible decisions. What they're lacking is not IQ, but wisdom. Which is no surprise; it has never been harder to tap into our inner wisdom, because in order to do so, we have to disconnect from all our omnipresent devices – our gadgets, our screens, our social media – and reconnect with ourselves.

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why. If you do not have things right in your life you will be overwhelmed: you may be heroic, but you will not be wise. If you have things right in your life but do not know why, you are just lucky, and you will not move in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

Good, wise hearts are obtained through lifetimes of diligent effort to dig deeply within and heal lifetimes of scars…. You can’t teach it or email it or tweet it. It has to be discovered within the depths of one’s own heart when a person is finally ready to go looking for it, and not before. The job of the wise person is to swallow the frustration and just go on setting an example of caring and digging and diligence in their own lives.

The job of the wise person is to swallow the frustration and just go on setting an example of caring and digging and diligence in their own lives. What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted. Never forget

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom

You must cultivate your wisdom and spirit. Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the Ways of different arts one by one. When you cannot be deceived by men you will have realized the wisdom of strategy.

Wise conduct is the key to happiness.
Always rule by gods and reverence them.
Those who overbear will be brought to grief.
Fate will flail them on its winnowing floor
And in due season teach them to be wise.

He who knows others is learned, but the wise one is the one who knows himself. Learning without wisdom is of no use.

Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.

That person then, whoever it may be, whose mind is quiet through consistency and self control, who finds contentment in himself, who neither breaks down in adversity nor crumbles in fright, nor burns with any thirsty need nor dissolves into wild and futile excitement, that person is the wise one we are seeking, and that person is happy